Symmetry
by Vashtijoy
Summary: It's the morning of September 12th, 2001. Light and Sayu react to the overnight news.


Light never forgets that Tuesday as long as he lives.

It's the second week of the second term of Light's first year in high school, and he's just returned from summer break. It's the first summer since he was ten, as it happens, that he hasn't been playing in a tennis tournament. It's meant he had more free time for study, of course; he's been adjusting and remaking himself since he retired the August before, aged all of fourteen. Light knows his mother's relieved: they're finally out of the perpetual whirl of training and practice matches, freed from the contests which somehow never managed to be in Tokyo. As for his father, Light tries to forget the pride in his eyes when he'd asked if Light was certain retiring was what he wanted. So relieved, he'd been, that his son wasn't going to waste his talents, that he didn't need to be told the right thing to do. He'd never have said it to Light's face; hadn't needed to, because Light will still sometimes listen at doors. It's his damnable curiosity, and a certain feeling that he can get away with bending the rules - and sometimes, the way it had that spring, it bites him hard. _Sachiko, anyone can knock a ball around._

But - the first summer without a tournament in five years. It dragged, endless like the ones in elementary school, but not as much fun. Light had found himself gazing at the top shelf of his wardrobe again, where he'd tucked the racquet away, out of sight forever. He does his best not to think about it; he's as close to being a grown man as he'll ever be, he knows, and there's no time for regrets when he has all that future to move into. But if he was honest, he'd admit it had been a miserable summer. His father had brought some casework home, in the end, and asked Light's opinion. He'd gone away and thought about it, and eventually come back and pointed out the detail that had led to a conviction. _There's a pattern on the map, don't you see it? The locations, they're too random. The two murders further in, they were later on, as if he wants people to think he wouldn't kill in his backyard. Of course, I could be wrong._

He'd been glad to be back in school. Until that morning; he watches the news over breakfast, preferring silence in his room at first, and until he'd come downstairs he couldn't know. This particular Tuesday has all the stations preempted to show the same footage of fire and death and dust over and over and over again.

Just like everyone else, Sayu catches the atmosphere from the TV. She panics, and cries, and doesn't want to go to school at all; they're throwing around predicted death counts that will make the eventual one look indecently tiny: fifty thousand, thirty thousand. Even in Japan, the New York skyline is iconic, and it's impossible not to be affected by the news they've woken up to. So it's Light who looks up from his untouched toast, with nothing approaching his usual mock-exasperation; who obliges her with "Really, Sayu. It's like you to let them win."

She bites, of course, as he'd known she would; so predictable, his little sister. He likes it that way. "That's a horrible thing to say to me, oniichan! It doesn't make any difference to anything if I stay home! Nobody cares what Yagami Sayu does!" It's anguished, through her tears, all the happy, fizzy bubbles bursting; Light's lips part in a chagrined pout; it always feels wrong to have to upset her. Getting her point, though, he doesn't counter with the automatic reassurance a comment like that should normally get: _That's not true, little sister._ Her face falls further as she continues, voluble and terrified and twelve; she's never been able to match Light for impromptu lying. "Besides, what if they blow up Dad's building? I'll be needed at home. It's very important. And Mum might be scared. You're _so inconsiderate_, oniichan."

If it didn't feel so inappropriate, that outburst would have made him smile; he suppresses it. It's long habit, as is the gently teasing brushaway of her fears. "Sayu, they wouldn't waste the bomb on it. And it's not as if they'll allow any planes near the city. Besides, didn't you hear them say they're evacuating public buildings?" Light doesn't suggest that their father might be home early today because of all this; both of them know how it works well enough. This will keep him away for a while, somewhere, somehow. A week? Two weeks? A month? There's no way to tell, and Light couldn't say, just at present, that the idea of his father boarding a flight to one of the regular Interpol meetings is a neutral one.

Eventually, seeing her distress mount, Light suggests that the two of them head for school together; this translates as him going out of his way to drop Sayu off at middle school. He scowls, and acts burdened, and lets her hold his hand right until they're within sight of the gates. She talks, subdued, about her classes and her friends; about pop music, which Light has no time for whatsoever, and about her favourite TV shows, some of which he lets register; it's an unstudied stream of chatter that trails off, and eventually they walk along in glum silence, at the side of the road beneath the wires and the bright blue summer sky. Someone's shut Sayu's deluge off. Something.

"- oniichan?"

"Yes?" Light looks across to her, startled out of his ruminations. _What's going to happen next? How heavy is the American response likely to be? How bad is "really bad"? _All the ins and outs of the issues fascinate him; it's something new and unfamiliar to work his intellect.

Walking along next to him, Sayu retreats into herself a little more before asking the hesitant question. "You don't ... really think I'm letting them win, do you? I don't mean to."

Light sighs a little, but doesn't rub his eyes with his free hand, as he might. "Sayu, they want us to be scared. Do you understand?" He can feel her eyes on him, still wide and childish; it's an intensity Light had been past at her age, as if she's hearing the voice of God. "It's not that anything is going to blow up because you stay home, of course. What they want to do is pressure governments - mainly the American one, but yes, ours too; the threat is economic as much as anything else. It's important that..."

As he explains it all, as theory and instinctive understanding turn into words, into something tangible he can do, he can't help brightening just a little. Smarter than she seems, Sayu sees it; she understands, and pretends not to, and maybe she squeezes his hand a little tighter. Lecturing her always cheers Light up.

* * *

Of course, there's only one thing to talk about in homeroom.

One of the girls - Sato, her name is - stands. Almost inaudible, she mumbles, "It's like a bad movie. I didn't think things like this happened." She's visibly shaken, and aren't they all? The class is sympathetic; they agree with her comments. Light nods quietly too, at his desk. _No, Sato, it's like a great movie. We've all grown up watching things like this for fun; don't tell me the rest of you aren't excited. The rest of you don't feel for those people. You say you do, but you don't. _It's typical teenage arrogance, and he doesn't realise it: that certainty that he's the only one who sees the world as it truly is, the only one intelligent enough to understand.

Another of the speakers is Fukuda, who likes to throws outrageous opinions into the mix to seem daring. "Um. I don't want to sound stupid or anything, but isn't this America's problem? They're the ones who poke their noses into everything. They make their own problems half the time. This doesn't affect us. This isn't anything to do with us. Shouldn't we leave them to it?" Most of the class try to look shocked, though there are faces smirking in agreement, here and there.

Now, as a rule, Light keeps his own counsel. When he speaks out, he's convincing enough, articulate enough that the others will fall into line with whatever he says. Plus, people who are too opinionated aren't liked. It's not strictly conscious, not a deliberate manipulation; it's simply how the world works. Perhaps he understands it now better than he did in elementary school, but the response is just as automatic and internalised. So when he offers a rare scowl, and pushes himself up to speak, the rest of the class listen; this should be good. "Forgive me, Fukuda-kun, but I really don't think this is the time. People are still dying, right now - and believe it or not, Americans are also people." Coming from him, the hint of sarcasm is scathing. "Could we perhaps wait for the dust to settle before we get into the politics of this?" As he says _politics_, there's an odd note of disdain, as if he'd like to pull his lips back and spit. And, as sometimes happens - Light's careful not to let it happen often - he's stunned the classroom, because it's _Yagami-kun_ abruptly taking control, reprimanding them, when he always seems so easy-going and unconcerned.

As usual, too, he hasn't said what he's thinking - or not _everything_ he's thinking. _Of course they brought it on themselves, but you're a fool to _say _that. Watch, and listen, and don't speak it; that's the smart thing to do._

The teacher eventually breaks the silence. "Well said, Yagami-kun. Does anyone else have something to say?" A few of the class look a little shamefaced, but nobody else gets up to speak. And honestly, Light's more shaken than he wants to admit to himself; he can't stop thinking about it, with that vivid imagination that's his curse. It's every night after he started school aged six, when he woke up in a puddle screaming that he was on fire; it's every news story about a housefire or a self-immolation he's ever seen. He pictures himself dying in the towers: the inferno closing in, the chemical burn of jet fuel high in his nostrils, and all of it closer and closer and up from below until he throws himself from the window just to end it. He doesn't know what he might do if something like this were to happen in Japan, and finds himself motivated all over again: _I'll never, never, never allow it. That's what my dad does; that's what I'm going to do. That's the point of it all.  
_  
When Kira emerges, a little over two years later, they're some of the first to die: the missing cultists from Aum Shinrikyo, Hirata and Takahashi and Kikuchi; and Nakamura, who was said to have shot the then-head of the NPA when Light was in elementary school. He'd never been convicted, but Light's father still hadn't come home on time for six weeks. And of course, bin Laden and al-Zawahiri and all the rest he can find, they die, the complicated Arabic names intricately researched and rehearsed and perfected on innocent paper that Light goes on to burn, the terror structure decapitated into yawing, disintegrating chaos.

Light doesn't think of it as replacing one tyranny with another. Why would he?

* * *

"You can't go around building a better world for people. Only people can build a better world for people. Otherwise it is just a cage..."  
- Esme Weatherwax.

* * *

In the end, it's Near and the SPK who stay inside the warehouse, with the staring, splayed body on the floor.

Mogi has taken Matsuda by the shoulder, has led him outside to where he can bury his face in his hands and not have to look at what he's done. To where he doesn't have to smell it: the blood and terror smeared across the concrete. He saw Ryuk too, and knows as well as anyone that he didn't kill Light, in the end. But he feels as if he's taken a life; as if he's been the betrayer, rather than the betrayed. The horror of it may never leave him.

It had been Aizawa who'd finally taken Mikami into custody; he was a Japanese citizen, after all, his crime committed in Japan. It's hard to tell whether he's in a worse state than Matsuda or not; they're both collapsed piles of human misery, just two more of Kira's innumerable victims. Nobody had been truly shocked when Mikami had broken out of his deferential shell to shriek his denial; Yagami _hadn't_ been a god, after all, and it would have taken considerably more delusion than Mikami possessed to think that he was. Especially after the man had as good as bayed to the moon; after he'd lain in his own blood begging and pleading. Mikami's outside now, too, in the back of the car. It's the same place his god had sat the previous day to kill Kiyomi Takada, but he doesn't know that. It's probably for the best.

Ryuk is gone; with the truth of the fake rules revealed, the notebooks have been burned. Near is sitting on the floor, surrounded by his finger puppets. Someone who knew him exceptionally well would see that he is stunned. The hand that still holds the Mello puppet quivers. "He died just like anybody else."

Rester also can't stop looking at the body. It's something about the denial and revulsion in its eyes; the outrage. As if, no matter how many he brought death to, Yagami never believed that it would ever come to _him_. _Maybe it wasn't just megalomania? Maybe he was still young enough to believe he was immortal?_ He's seen the same look on so many young idiots he'd helped scrape from roads and out of cars, back when he was starting out. What was Kira, in the end, but another young idiot, consumed by the certainty of his own immortality?

No matter what it was, Rester's still glad the man is dead. "Did you expect anything different?"

"I'm surprised it was as easy as it was. Yagami was intelligent. I didn't expect him to hand us a confession. And -" Near shrugs, looks down at the floor and the puppets with difficulty. All the pointless thoughts he can't articulate now that it's over; the feelings he can't quite see the shape of. The things L taught him without ever being there. That no matter what the nature of Yagami's evil had been, no matter that he'd enslaved the world through terror, no matter that he would have gloried as Near and all the rest dropped in front of him, no matter that he'd have had no more feeling for the Japanese taskforce who he'd worked with for years since before he came of age...

...he hadn't deserved to die like that. _Nobody did. Nobody does. This wasn't justice. _Though Near is certain that if anyone at all deserved this, Yagami did. He'd like to have seen him granted more time - a lot of it, ideally, to think about what he'd done, to begin to understand some of what he'd inflicted on the world. Perhaps at the end he got an intimation of some of that terror? Near hopes so; he really does. He can't help thinking of L and Mello, who are dead; can't help approving that they're avenged; can't help knowing that L would not approve of Near's approval.

There's procedure to follow, of course; there always is. For all that Yagami was struck down by a shinigami, he was still shot three times with an illegal handgun; it's nothing Near won't be able to sweep under the carpet. But when the ambulance arrives, they've already outlined the body in chalk, taken photograph after photograph, an ongoing procedure. There's no siren; who is there to rush for, after all? Mogi's voice, instructing the paramedics. They wheel in the trolley, careful not to disturb anything, and perform the routine checks over the very clearly dead body of a young police officer tragically killed in the course of the final confrontation with Kira. He'll be remembered as a hero; there's no way around that. Somehow, Near doubts it would have pleased the man in the least - not that anything will again, or as if that's why they'll allow it. They load him up, and cover him, and wheel him out to the waiting ambulance.

It's as if hell and all its devils have abruptly vanished from the room. Gevanni sighs, relaxing out of sight; Lidner thaws, and her stiff shoulders relax. Thinking of Mello, perhaps? Near doesn't begin to understand, and thus has no opinion, except that Mello had lived impetuous, and he'd gone to his grave that way. Settling into their assigned roles, they cordon off the area, go through the motions of walkthroughs, and sweep and resweep for evidence, as if they don't all know exactly what happened.

It's dark before they finish up the final survey. Ready to leave this warehouse behind him forever, Near - _L_, now - stands. Behind him, Rester makes a confession of his own, surprisingly wry. "I'm so glad that's done. I'll never be that terrified again as long as I live."

Near turns to look at him, up through the leaded windows in the ceiling, up towards the sky of the world he's going to live to see. "I know what you mean," he says. One last look back at the high ceiling, at the floor with its deceptive chalk outline; he'll never have to listen to that fan squeak again. As the two of them head for the door, he's left with an odd thought. _Justice: it's a bell suspended on its pinnacle, swinging this way and that. And each of us thinks he hears the true note best._


End file.
